


Early Retirement

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory, Cunnilingus, Developing Relationship, F/F, Flashbacks, Multi, Omera Has Two Hands, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Plot Twist, Polyamory Leadup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21625114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Cara never thought of Omera as hers. No one in their squad had the life expectancy necessary to get possessive. Still, though, she wonders if she ought to have waited for some other mark, with a little less of the sexy competence, or the cute kid, or the shroud of mystery. “What if he’s got a face like an embalmed Dug?” she whispers when she and Omera are on the same side of the cookfire that night.Omera’s elbow digs into Cara’s ribs, over a fresh bruise, and Cara grunts. “I aim to find out,” Omera says primly, returning to her plate.Cara knows well that Omera hits what she aims for. But Cara signed up for this without expectation, so what’s changed?Nothing at all.
Relationships: Cara Dune/Omera (The Mandalorian TV), The Mandalorian/Omera (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 123





	Early Retirement

Cara has never been foolish enough to picture herself in a recruitment holo. There were kids who thought they had a shot at that kind of thing, and they let it show on their faces, but the ones who survived their first mission lost the cocky glint in their eyes real fast. What they did was not glamorous. It was hands-on, and messy. The Alliance didn’t advertise with drop soldiers. 

The New Republic certainly doesn’t advertise with riot guards. 

No one can see a cocky glint in her eyes, even if she still has one; the helmet covers her face, and beyond that is the crackling glow of a personal shield. She can see the faces on the other side of it, though: angry, and increasingly scared as her squadmates tighten formation. 

They’ve scattered the demonstrators at the spaceport, and cornered the ones who refused to scatter, the ones who are organized and well-trained, against the terminal’s exterior wall. Their shield units interlock, an unbreakable line. They advance, as inevitable as a glacier, with none of the warmth. 

Cara will sneer at the notion of honor, given a chance, and she doesn’t give a damn for glamour, but she does have pride. There is no pride in this. There is money, yes, and the lip-service appreciation of the nascent New Republic and its trade partners.

She used to take an awful lot of pride in ripping the helmets off stormtroopers and pounding her fists against the faces that were hiding there. Lately it has begun to feel like she’s on the wrong side of the helmet. It’s gotten a little too easy to look at someone’s face through her shield and believe, in the flicker and the glow, that she’s just watching a holo. 

Something strikes her visor. A rock, or maybe a chunk of duracrete pried off the spaceport itself. She doesn’t break the shield line. They can throw whatever they like; one in a hundred will get the angle just right to arc over the shield and actually hit a guard. 

Something strikes her visor again. 

It leaves behind a tiny crack. She takes one hand off her shield unit and reaches up to touch it, but of course through the gauntlet she can feel nothing. 

Cara stops leaning into the crowd, and the responsive boundary of her shield tries to move with her, to hold the line. There’s probably a limit to how far it can stretch and still keep its integrity, but it doesn’t matter, because she turns her unit off, tosses it aside. Takes off her helmet, too. 

“What the kriff, Dune--” her sergeant starts, but Cara is already wading into the mob that surges toward the hole she made. 

She has seen crowd control turn bad before, in the footage the delegates and their corporate backers always try to lock down before it spreads across the Holonet. But those disasters involve truncheons, or chemical mist, or shock sticks, or non-lethal projectiles. This time it’s just Cara. 

Her fists find a soft gut, a cheekbone, a solar plexus, a kidney, and their various equivalents in non-human anatomy. It feels _good._ Her muscles sing with it. The guards are yelling something, but they don’t matter. All that matters is she doesn’t have that hunk of plasteel on her face--

Something strikes her head, just over the temple. Cara staggers and puts a hand up, and her gauntlet comes away red, but she’s had enough head injuries to know this one will bleed like hell but not leave lasting damage. It slows her down just enough to notice a dark figure in dark clothes, dark hair streaming from under a dark cap as they run past, and Cara knows at once, that’s her rock sniper. 

She barrels after the dissident, past the broken ring of guards and the sergeant that was about to take her down with a stun shot. Her quarry darts into an alley, and from there into a warren of old shipping containers-turned-shantytown. They’re fast, but Cara can keep up a sprint. 

Past the shantytown there’s a dingy plaza, and the open space gives her just enough time to close the distance and dive, both arms locked around the dissident’s waist, and they fall together to the ground. Cara recovers first, gets her knee on the dissident’s back and leans over far enough to drip blood right by their head, which they’re turning to the side now, coughing, and Cara’s eyes are crossing or she was hit harder than she thought, because kark her with a pointy stick, it can’t be. 

“Omera?” 

Omera wheezes, and Cara lifts her knee, and Omera turns over, and she’s got a scrape across her cheek and she’s covered in grime from the fall, but even looking like this they would probably still put her in a recruitment holo. 

Omera spits dust. “Who the hell are you?” she rasps, and for a half second Cara thinks something is terribly wrong before she realizes it’s a rhetorical thing. She’s still in the beetle-green gorget and gauntlets--still clearly one of them. 

She leans away. “What were you doing back there?” she demands, because it’s all she can think to say. “It’s the New Republic, Omera.” 

“The New Republic wants the shipyards,” Omera says, “and no one here wants the New Republic to make a trade deal with a Diktat who won’t lift the non-human ban established by the Empire.” Omera gets to her hands and knees. “Things are complicated, Cara. You have to actually think.” 

Cara doesn’t have the bandwidth to feel insulted in the moment. “I thought you got picked up for Inferno Squad.” 

“I resigned after a year.” Omera stands and smacks the dirt out of her clothes. 

“Why?” 

She shuts her eyes and lets out a breath. “I’ll show you.” 

All the way through the city center and into another slum district, Cara stares at Omera’s back. Their squad had a watch party for the recruitment holo. Omera sent away for some spotchka, the first Cara had ever tasted, surprisingly smooth and sweet. They joked and they ribbed and they drank, but Cara watched and Cara thought. 

Omera with her repeater rifle and her quiet eyes in the holo, looking grim and somehow kind at the same time. A staged scene outside a bunker: Omera taking careful, careful aim from a perfectly hidden spot, blowing out a breath as her finger tightened on the trigger, and five hundred yards away a stormtrooper (a droid inside stormtrooper armor) took three shots in their helmet before they fell to the ground, clearing the way for Pathfinders to enter the base. Make a difference. Join the New Republic. 

Cara watched, and Cara thought that if she hadn’t already signed up, that would do the trick. 

Omera’s flat is tiny, and as clean as she can make it when the building itself seems to be constructed from carbon scoring. Cara sits on the little couch and takes off the gauntlets and permits Omera the unnecessary ritual of patching up her head wound. The spray stings; she endures it silently. Her eyes settle on the canister of cheap kolto salve in the medkit. She wants to put some on her thumb and pass it gently over Omera’s cheek. She doesn’t, and Omera does it herself when she’s finished with Cara. 

“Okay,” Omera says. “Follow me.” And she leads Cara to a room down the hall with one glowlamp still on, casting weak light on a little girl asleep under blankets on a narrow pallet. “Her name is Winta,” Omera whispers. 

“Is she Hoen’s?” Cara asks. The kid has his look. Omera punches her in the side, not hard, because Omera isn’t built for punching. “I get it,” Cara says. “You really liked him.” Omera shoves her all the way back to the sitting room. 

Cara drops back onto the couch. “I don’t think they’ll hire me back on after this.” 

Omera snorts and rubs at her face, avoiding the scratch. “I don’t think they’ll let you live after this.” 

Cara hasn’t let herself think about that yet, but she’s right. 

Omera takes pity and smiles at her. “I know a Nikto who does good scandocs, and I have a face scrambler for the spaceport cams. We can get you off-planet.” 

“What about you?” They’ll trace her. They’ll run back the recording from the cam in Cara’s helmet or the cams outside the terminal, and they’ll probably see Omera throw the rocks, and that will be the end of this life. Not an option. Cara sits up and grabs Omera’s hand. “Come with me.” 

Omera looks down at their hands. “Where?” 

She tries to think of a place but she is distracted by Omera’s fine-boned hand. After the party she thought it would be just one night. A good night, but neither of them wanted more at the time. 

Omera’s hands. Omera’s full lips. Omera’s fingers down Cara’s trousers and up Cara’s tunic, and Cara’s tongue in Omera’s mouth, and Omera’s hair wrapped all around Cara’s fingers, a mess that could only be untangled when Cara relaxed her hands, when she surrendered completely, but Omera only leaned into it, pressed closer, stroked deeper. 

Omera on top of her until she wasn’t, until Cara put her on her back and gave her a kiss before she turned, her knees on either side of Omera’s shoulders and her breath trembling at Omera’s magnificent cunt, and Omera’s hands reaching up to her broad waist and Omera kissing Cara’s thighs and whispering _please, please_ , and trying to reach Cara but Cara kept her hips high and her head low and her tongue on Omera, on Omera and in Omera, until Omera came with no place to stifle her voice, and then Cara turned again but kept her knees on either side of Omera’s shoulders, and she held on to the frame of the bunk above them so she wouldn’t smother her, and Omera’s quiet eyes watched her, and Omera’s sweet tongue and beautiful lips swept Cara away. 

It became five nights, and then it became a month. And their unit got split up and Cara went on a long string of assignments, and came back to find Omera had a new bedpartner, and that was the end of that, and somewhere down the line one of them must have given her Winta. And now all Cara wants is Omera’s lips again. 

“I thought about going home,” says Omera, who clearly has not been thinking about them having sex for the past several minutes. 

“You hate Sorgan.” 

“I hated the quiet,” Omera says. “I couldn’t get away fast enough.” 

Quiet could be nice. “What if we’re followed?” 

“Then I’ll need you to watch my back for a change.” 

So. Omera gets scandocs for all three of them, and Cara keeps her head down in the spaceport, and they get a ride on a freighter to Sorgan, and they are back in Omera’s little village with its krill-dyed everything for all of three days before the raiders come. 

It’s night, and at the first laser blast Cara bolts up from the mat beside Omera’s bed. Omera grabs her with one hand, her other arm around Winta. She moves her face into the light coming through a slat in her little hut, and mouths, _If they know you’re here, it will be worse._

And Cara, hating every second of it, puts her blaster away. She only has the one, anyway, and going by the noise there are a dozen or more bandits out there, plus the big guns. 

At sunrise they survey the smoking village, the depleted harvest. “How many would it take, do you think?” Omera asks. 

Cara tries to see the village the way Omera would, from a high place. They are terribly exposed in the center of the clearing, and hopelessly weak. She thinks of her guard squad, and subtracts the useless ones. “Seven, maybe.” The Pathfinders did more with less. Cara’s strike team was smaller when they brought Zsinj down, and the bandits here are brazen to the point of clumsiness, overconfident in their firepower. 

Anticipating her next thought, Omera says, “Won’t find seven fighters on Sorgan.” Never one for the mincing of words, was Omera, but now Cara understands where she gets it. The old farmers deliver pronouncements about coming droughts in the same tone. 

“Won’t even find seven blasters,” Cara mutters. She doesn’t insult them both by suggesting they send for help from the New Republic. Not kriffing likely. 

Who would come to Sorgan? Someone who’s running from something, just like them. Someone who wants seclusion, even more than they want coin. 

Fortunately, there’s only one place to cast their net. And maybe Cara never would have been picked for a recruitment holo, but she’s not half bad at recruitment--at least her end of it, before Stoke and Caben go plead their case. Maybe she could have been command material, with her knack for picking a team. It’s rare enough to meet someone who can fight her to a draw, let alone someone who brings a small armory with him. 

Omera approves, that much is clear. She looks at the stranger almost the same way she looks at the pulse rifle on his back. 

Cara never thought of Omera as hers. No one in their squad had the life expectancy necessary to get possessive. Still, though, she wonders if she ought to have waited for some other mark, with a little less of the sexy competence, or the cute kid, or the shroud of mystery. “What if he’s got a face like an embalmed Dug?” she whispers when she and Omera are on the same side of the cookfire that night. 

Omera’s elbow digs into Cara’s ribs, over a fresh bruise, and Cara grunts. “I aim to find out,” Omera says primly, returning to her plate. 

Cara knows well that Omera hits what she aims for. But Cara signed up for this without expectation, so what’s changed?

Nothing at all. 

* * *

When it’s all over she reeks from the krill pond, but Omera still finds her in the dark and gives her a hasty, forceful kiss. 

* * *

That ought to be enough. She ought to leave when the Mandalorian does. He was right about the attention they would draw, and the Kubaz she shot in the woods will not be the last--but Cara can just as easily turn that into a reason to stay. 

Which gives her two reasons to stay, and zero reasons to be anywhere else. 

“So. Did he take your heart with him?” Cara asks when they’re on the same side of the cookfire again. 

Omera blows out a breath, softly, but Cara still hears it. She might be rolling her eyes, or looking fondly at the stars. “Just a piece of it.” 

At least he left a few blasters in exchange. If he ever comes back, they should probably tell him they conned him into the job, more or less. Or maybe it won't matter, because if he comes back it will be for Omera with her proud face and her quiet eyes. If he knew, he'd love Omera regardless, just like Cara would. Just like Cara does. 

She flicks a krill shell off her plate and into the fire. “Seems like you’ve been giving pieces out for years.” 

Omera holds her hand, palm-up, toward Cara. “There’s a little left for you.” 

Cara puts her hand firmly in Omera’s, and they watch the embers float into the night sky. 


End file.
